This is an exceptional book -- insightful and interesting. It follows the author's earlier work in the 1990s, forecasting the state of the world in 2020. He was much more right than wrong (I loved that book, too!).

McRae examines large-scale trends that will unfold over the coming decades, including the aging of the populations in China, the US and Europe, population growth in Africa that will create a much younger continent, economic growth in formerly-emerging countries around the world, a shift from manufacturing exports to services exports, and technology and climate change to paint a really detailed picture of the world thirty years hence.

His book takes on risks and threats directly. Those include climate destruction and environmental catastrophes, regions in which wars might break out, and the tensions between authoritarian and democratic political movements around the world. The promise and problems of immigration are central to the economic arguments he makes.

The book is, in the end, optimistic, but not blindly so. It was nice to step out of the daily drumbeat of crisis news to take a look at longer-term trends and the outcomes they are likely to produce.

I learned a lot! ( )